Students take French class project to next level

Sunday

LAWNDALE — A group of Laura Parker's French students took what could have been a run-of-the-mill assignment and created a published book they will send to children in Haiti.

Parker, a French teacher at Burns High School, said every year the students in her French III and IV classes do a unit on fairy tales, learning to read and write them. At the end of the unit, they usually create pop-up books, but this year, the class decided to take a different approach.

"The class I had this time are super amazing kids, and one said, 'Why can’t we do something that we could send to some kids who don’t have books?'" Parker said. "We decided to do something a little more formal, so they wrote their stories as traditional fairy tales. The purpose is to teach the kids something."

Parker said the 10 students worked on their stories for about a month. Some worked together and others individually, and once they were finished, they partnered with students in Steven Pruitt's art class to create the illustrations. The book was sent to an affordable printing company, and now they have 20 copies they'll send to an orphanage in Haiti.

She said they chose Haiti because it's a French-speaking country, and a local church group visiting the country on a mission this summer will take the books with them to present to the children.

"They’re such an amazing group of kids. They took an assignment that could have been boring and got so excited about it," Parker said. "They took something they learned and used it to help someone else. It’s probably the best thing you can see as a teacher."

Parker said this project was a memorable experience not only because a group of Haitian children will benefit, but also because of what her students gained.

"It’s really nice to see kids who don’t passively sit back and learn, but instead get active and involved," she said. "Their faces when they saw those books, they actually have something they’ve created that they can hold in their hands. Learning a language isn’t just filling in worksheets ... I think this is a way to encourage them to continue studying French."

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